Conveyor belts are widely used in a diverse set of industrial and commercial applications. In some applications, the conveyor belt is supported on the underside, on its return trip in the opposite direction, by idler rollers called return rollers.
Many industrial operations, such as mining or other resource extraction operations, rely on conveyor belts to move large quantities of heavy material between processing steps in the operation. Many of these operations produce low-cost resources and depend on large high-speed, high-volume conveyor belt systems to provide the necessary throughput to make the operation profitable. In such operations, machine maintenance, including maintenance of the conveyor belt, and the resulting downtime, is carefully planned and scheduled to maximize productivity and, thus, profitability of the operation.
High wear is a significant problem for idler-type rollers in a conveyor belt system and can lead to costly unscheduled downtime as a result of wear-related failure or the need for replacement. When a roller requires unscheduled maintenance, the entire conveyor belt system, and often all associated processes, must be shut down to access and replace the roller. The financial cost to an operation, associated with a process-wide shutdown, can be unacceptably high.
Accordingly, there is a need for devices that enable real time replacement of worn idler rollers, during conveyor operations, to prevent or reduce unscheduled downtime of conveyor belts, due to wear-related failure of idler rollers.